ATM, there are close to 200,000 tasks available to users. That changes by the minute, but has been fairly constant over the last few weeks.

You're getting the timeouts due to high load on the servers coming out of regular Tuesday maintenance.

There is no such thing anymore as a 10 day cache, unless you run Astropulse exclusively. Limits in place mean that you can have a maximum of 800 tasks at a time, i.e., 50 per CPU core, and 400 per GPU. With most of the Fermi class GPU's, 400 WU's are less than a day's worth.

Boinc just seems to struggle to regularly fetch SETI@home Enhanced 6.03 windows_intelx86 tasks at the moment and wondering what the issue is and if it's my setup/preferences or something else?

Boinc fetches lots of SETI@home Enhanced 6.10 windows_intelx86 (cuda_fermi) for the GPU and I have pages of them waiting to run!

This leaves my i7 machine running 2x Astropulse v6 6.01 on 2 of 8 available cores with a cuda_firma also running on the GPU:

This leaves 5/6 cores doing nothing for Boinc!

Is it somehow possible to tell Boinc to use more than 1 core per task if there's cores doing nothing?

That would involve a re-write of the SETI applications to be multi threaded. There are other projects you can add to your BOINC installs. Adding a handful of projects that usually have work will allow your computer to be doing something for some project all the time. I have not actually run out of work since the third BOINC project came on line. There were a few times early on where there was only one of the three that had work available at any time. Now with > 50 projects, anyone should be able to find 5 or 6 that suit them.BOINC WIKI

13/04/2012 05:44:00 | SETI@home | No tasks are available for Astropulse v505
13/04/2012 05:44:00 | SETI@home | No tasks are available for SETI@home v7
13/04/2012 05:44:00 | SETI@home | No tasks are available for AstroPulse v6

Yup, you will at this time just have had it that the feeder was empty. The feeder holds 100 tasks to send out at maximum, evenly spread over the available applications (50 Multibeam Seti_Enhanced / 50 Astropulse) if your BOINC asks for work just at the moment that the feeder sent out the last of these 100 to another computer, and before it has renewed its cache, then you get the answer that there's no work for the applications you chose.

13/04/2012 05:44:00 | SETI@home | No tasks are available for Astropulse v505

This version of Astropulse is being phased out. As of writing this reply, 1,142 remaining out in the field.

13/04/2012 05:44:00 | SETI@home | No tasks are available for SETI@home v7

This version of Seti_Enhanced is being phased in, although there's no real v7 apps yet, for any platform. Give it another 14 days in the least.

13/04/2012 05:44:00 | SETI@home | No tasks are available for AstroPulse v6

This versions of Astropulse is being phased in, to replace version 5.00 (already deprecated), version 5.01 (already deprecated) and the above version 5.05. Jord

Ancient Astronaut Theorists can tell you that I do not help with tech questions via private message. Please use the forums for that.